Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Failsafe chicken risotto

Ingredients:

1 leek
2 spring onions
40g canola oil
1 large clove garlic
1 whole chicken breast
2 stalks celery
2 T celtic sea salt
200g frozen peas
1 cup pear juice (250 ml)
1/2 cup chicken stock (125 ml)
400g arborio rice
725ml water

(total liquid 1100ml)

- chop the celery and put aside
- chop the leek/spring onions/garlic, and 40g canola oil and saute for 2 mins (100, speed 2)
- add chicken and saute for 5 minutes
- add celery, rice, pear juice and saute for 3 minutes
- add stock, water, salt and cook for 15 minutes, reverse, 1.5
- in last 5 minutes add frozen peas

This is a failsafe modification of the mushroom risotto recipe in the thermomix book

Verdict:

Delicious. Everybody enjoyed it. Will cook again. Added 2 scoops of elecare to Kate's and she ate all her dinner.

Fortifying Kate's food

We met with our dietitian today and decided to take the following steps to try and assist Kate with gaining weight:

(1) Fortify her food with elemental formula
(2) Give her 4 solid meals a day
(3) Make sure every meal has protein or good fats (eg Canola oil or nuttelex on veges or pasta)

So tonight I opened my first ever tin of formula! 6 and a half years of parenting and 3 children... I thought I'd escaped without formula but I am thankful to have neocate as an option and am very hopeful that fortifying her food will help her add on some grams, maybe even kilograms?

Weight tonight: 7.23 kg

My thermomix

Last week we were in Adelaide and my friend Jo started telling me about the thermomix that her friend Julia had. Throughout my days with Jo it came up again and again. Its a blender, a food processor, scales, it cooks. At first I wasn't particularly interested but the more I heard the more I started to wonder if this might be a huge help to me.

Julia was available our last night in Adelaide and came and did a demo. My husband and I were sold after the first course (actually I think we were pretty convinced just after checking the website)

The reason it is of such interest to us is our third child, Kate, has food intolerances. She is intolerance to dairy, salycilates and some preservatives (282, 320). Kate is 7 months old and I am breastfeeding her and so our whole family's diet has changed in order that I can continue breastfeeding her. I follow the failsafe diet (with moderate fruit & veg) and most of our meals come from the RPA Allergy Unit's Friendly Food cook book.

Kate has reactions to the smallest amount of preservatives in foods that I eat. We have found that me drinking the Aldi brand soy milk causes her issues whereas she does better when I drink bonsoy . This has led us to question everything we eat - what additives, preservatives, colours, etc does it contain? We now eat less and less prepared food and make more and more ourselves. Our 6 year old is not entirely thrilled with the lack of prepared morning teas for school, but otherwise we are all enjoying our improved diet.

We have hit a plateau with Kate's weight and are struggling to get her to eat more food and consume more calories, plus it is not easy for me to follow my restricted diet in order to keep my milk safe.

The Thermomix opens all sorts of possibilities for our whole family.

There are lots of Thermomix blogs around but her I am going to record my adventures with using Failsafe ingredients with the Thermomix.